The sand erupted twenty yards ahead. Not a creature of flesh, but a localized vortex of magnetic force, dragging shards of metal and stone into a towering, serpentine shape. It was the planet’s immune system, a sentient storm born of the very dust they walked on.

"Static-Wyrm," Mira hissed, her hand flying to her flare gun.

The air on HDPlanet Dune didn’t just carry dust; it carried memory.

"Drop the anchors!" Kaelen yelled, slamming a grounding rod into the sand to divert the charge. "We aren't leaving without the Glass."

The storm roared, the sky turned a bruised purple, and the hunt began.

But as they slid down the slope toward the prize, the ground began to vibrate. It wasn't the wind. The hum of the dunes shifted from a melodic drone to a rhythmic, thumping growl.

"Check the oscillation, Kael," a voice crackled in his ear. It was Mira, perched on the ridge of a crest that looked like a frozen tidal wave. "The storm’s pulling the static toward the north. If we don’t find the wreck now, the magnetism will bury it for another decade."

Kaelen adjusted his rebreather, the copper-tinted sky of the planet pressing down like a physical weight. On the maps of the United Colonies, this world was technically "HD-8842b," but to the scavengers and outcasts who lived here, it was simply Dune. It wasn’t like the deserts of Old Earth. Here, the sand was composed of pulverized silicon and rare-earth magnets, creating shifting dunes that sang with a low, metallic hum whenever the wind reached forty knots.

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